Monday, January 1, 2018

Almost New Year’s Eve gaming

For a while, I was in a Skype game of old school Marvel Superheroes. Time commitments made it too difficult for me to stay but I get invited when they have one-shots. And I managed to make a special, almost-the-end-of-the-year, game on December 30th.

The basic plot of the one-shot was that the UN was sending a group of heroes to an another dimension to retrieve the board of Mys-Tech, a bunch of evil wizards from the Warhead comic book (which I never read and knew nothing about)

While most of my time playing the old Marvel system was spent in homebrew campaigns, Dennis runs his game nominally in the Marvel universe. When he runs one-shots, he just lets us pick from an appropriate group of previously established Marvel characters.

This time, he gave us a selection of Avengers, Alpha Flight members and other international heroes. Looking through the list, I immediately saw *the* choice: Devil Dinosaur! A later creation of Jack Kirby, Devil is a mutant Tyrannosaurus Rex who has bright red skin and the intelligence of a high school sophomore (to steal a line from Roger Zelazny)

The rest of the team consisted of Skaar, son of the Hulk, Talisman and Havok (who was easily the least obscure character in the bunch, at least until Devil Dinosaur gets his own movie)

Short version of how things went: Talisman teleported the team right into the board room and we stomped on them until they were dead (Marvel has a pretty strict moral code but Devil Dinosaur is flexible about who people are), in traction or surrendered. Dennis figured the UN would send in overwhelming force and that’s pretty much what we were. The goal wasn’t a high drama, desperate fight but a total romp.

Devil Dinosaur was a great choice for a fun, slightly silly game. For spoken dialogue, I just said the word ‘roar’ while typing in chat Bertie Wooster-like comments ‘Dash it all, that’s dirty pool, old bean!’ And knowing that I had poor psyche and couldn’t handle any magic attacks on my mind, I jumped over the mooks to just literally stomp on the squishy mages. Proved to be a successful strategy.

Back in the Midwest, I used to spend New Year’s board gaming until I dropped. Small child doesn’t lend itself to that. However, playing this game felt like a tribute to that tradition.